A Hewlett Foundation and Gates Foundation Project Mastery grantee, the non-profit organization Asia Society collaborated with ShowEvidence to develop Pathways to Global Competence. This is a proficiency-based badging system for high school students. The project aimed to engage learners in “powerful, relevant, and self-directed [ways] as they master skills and knowledge enabling them to develop their identity as a global youth leader” (HASTAC). The badging effort aimed to expand students’ cross-cultural knowledge and enhance their understanding of global issues.

Badges allow recognition of learning that occurs across contexts, but this presents challenges for assessment. This case study details how UC Davis’ Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems program is designing an assessment system to match the ambitious goal of recognizing learning that students build up over many experiences in different contexts.

In a NASA-funded initiative, Project Whitecard Inc. collaborated with the Center for Educational Technologies (CET) at Wheeling Jesuit University to construct a badge system for middle to high school students with the goal of promoting skills and competence in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The project designed a badge system to build upon their existing programs of robotics-related educational projects and activities, offering a new way to recognize students for their skills and achievements.

Supporter to Reporter (S2R) provides learning opportunities for young people to take on the roles of sports journalists, media producers, and mentors. S2R Medals will recognize and reward the skills and achievements gained by young reporters who learn and demonstrate a rich array of competencies acquired through their participation in the program.

Supporter To Reporter, an existing program developed by DigitalMe in the UK, participated in the Digital Media & Learning competition focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning. S2R won a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to implement Mozilla OBI-compliant digital badges in support of its educational objectives, helping young people to learn skills required in sports journalism and apply them in their communities.

Sweet Water AQUAPONS is an online platform where students gain digital badges as they learn the skills needed in aquaponics. The Sweet Water Foundation (SWF) developed AQUAPONS to provide self-directed learning opportunities to future sustainable agriculture practitioners and expand the field of aquaponics by creating a replicable model for urban agriculture education.

The Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems is a new interdisciplinary major that integrates a portfolio system featuring digital badges. UC Davis’s Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences developed “a model of learning, participation, and assessment focused around high-level ‘core competencies’ that bridge classroom and real-world experiences, academic investigations and concrete skills. We believe this model has the ability to train leaders who will transform the food system, changing the way each of us eats and lives.”

Preface The information contained in this project appendix was gathered from the original project proposal that was funded in 2012 and interviews with project leaders through the end of 2014. This appendix and the overall design principles database from the…

Regardless of where you start, it’s more than likely you’ll end up somewhere other than your intended destination. That’s okay. Systems are living things, and your badge system needs to be flexible. You must embrace a bit of chaos in its design.
-Carla Casilli, Director of Design + Practice at the Badge Alliance